A new start-up called Whamcloud is coming out of stealth mode Wednesday with $10 million in private funding and a notion to disrupt the often academic world of supercomputing by leveraging the Lustre open-source project.

According to CEO Brent Gorda, the company is targeting the need for high-performance storage solutions based on the popular combination of Linux and Lustre for application and data storage environments. The company plans to offer support and services initially, with an eye toward a turnkey supercomputing setup with hardware and software components, in the future.

For those less familiar with supercomputing technologies, Lustre is a … Read more

A new report from security software provider Secunia shows that despite considerable security investments, the software industry at large is unable to produce software with substantially fewer vulnerabilities.

The latest data shows that Apple has surpassed Oracle and even Microsoft with accounting for the most software vulnerabilities, though the No. 1 ranking is related only to the number of vulnerabilities--not to how risky they are or how fast they get patched.

This analysis also supports the general perception that a high market share correlates with a high number of vulnerabilities--with Apple (maker of iTunes and QuickTime), Microsoft (Windows, Internet Explorer), … Read more

Set to be released later today, the latest Digital Goods Spending Report by analyst firm VG Market and in-game monetization provider Playspan, shows that the burgeoning market for virtual goods is still just scratching the surface of the enormous opportunity ahead.

July's report reveals that 75 percent of the respondents (a sample size of 2,221 respondents was polled) have used real-world money to pay for virtual goods, and that roughly half expect to continue to spend about the same amount of real-world cash over the next 12 months.

Additionally, women over the age of 25 are stepping up … Read more

Data center and cloud infrastructure service provider Rackspace is expected to announce Monday the release of a new open-source offering that will allow users to build and launch their own internal and hosted clouds.

Dubbed OpenStack, the new Apache-licensed project will feature several cloud infrastructure components, including a fully distributed object store based on Rackspace Cloud Files, the company's highly scalable storage engine.

In addition to the initial offering, a scalable compute-provisioning engine based on the NASA Nebula cloud technology and Rackspace Cloud Servers technology is expected to be available later this year.

Rackspace has been hosting enterprise computing … Read more

When the U.S. federal government closed the curtain on analog broadcasts last June, one set of screens that forever embraced a slumber of white noise was analog handheld TVs such as the Sony Watchman. The already modest popularity of these products waned as their broadcast system reached its end. Furthermore, their usefulness could not be prolonged as was the case for millions of analog TV sets connected to cable or satellite set-tops or paired with a converter box offered through the federal coupon program.

It was not long, though, before a new crop of digital televisions rose to take … Read more

A new developer survey report from open-source business intelligence vendor Jaspersoft shows that there has been minimal fallout from Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems, and that Java and MySQL seem to be doing just fine in their new home.

These results contrast with the latest developments of the OpenSolaris project, which, under Oracle's watch, has seen its Governing Board threatening to disband.

MySQL and Java have a strong presence in modern open-source software stacks, both in the enterprise and in Web shops. Interestingly, the survey report suggests that, thanks to Oracle's commitment to Java, as part of … Read more

Despite the fact that the state is constantly teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, California remains at the top of the venture capital heap churning out the most deals with the most dollar volume in the second quarter of 2010.

A new report from private company research firm CB Insights reveals that California companies took more than 50 percent of total venture dollars in the second quarter with financings breaking the $3 billion funding mark and more than half of those funds going toward health care and Internet companies. In addition to California, two other states--Massachusetts and New York--accounted for … Read more

I was in Japan last week for a number of meetings related to brand development and disruptive software and found myself less intrigued by the overwhelming array of Japanese mobile phones and more interested in the handheld game consoles from Nintendo and others.

It's not that there aren't a plethora of mobile phones that have all kinds of cool features, but that since generally those phones can't be used in the U.S. (and most don't offer English interfaces) the game consoles became a lot more interesting.

One of the news items I was late to … Read more

NoSQL databases and associated operational-data technologies based on nonrelational approaches to data management and manipulation continue to be top of mind for big Web shops and are slowly starting to make their way into enterprise IT infrastructure.

This means that developers need to get a handle on the latest information about NoSQL and big data in order to stay on top of the trend.

Accordingly, developer site DZone just released a new Getting Started with NoSQL and Data Scalability reference card as part of their cheat-sheet library.

The refcard is a good primer to get you asking all the right … Read more